


Going Rogue

by Plenty_of_Paper



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Gen, M/M, Parks and Rec AU, Rogue One: a Parks and Rec story, inspired by deeply upsetting current events
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-28
Updated: 2017-01-28
Packaged: 2018-09-20 12:40:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9491327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Plenty_of_Paper/pseuds/Plenty_of_Paper
Summary: In which Cassian Andor is the long-suffering head of the National Park Service's Division of Fire and Aviation Management. Bodhi Rook is one of his pilots, and he will not be silenced so easily.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I suppose this is the way my subconscious has chosen to cope: marrying my intense love of Parks and Rec and the Rogue One cast with my growing horror at the way the new U.S. administration seems to be governing. I don't think either the Parks and Rec gang or the Rogue One crew would have taken this sitting down. (Originally dashed off in the middle of the night. I've obviously taken some liberties with the structure of the NPS.)

President Vader’s gag order on several federal agencies wasn’t entirely a surprise, but it was deeply upsetting.

“This is wrong,” Bodhi said, “so, so wrong.”

“So you have told me, five times in the last half hour,” Cassian grumbled, reaching into his desk for a metal flask.

“How can a government decide that telling its citizens facts - undeniable, verifiable _facts_ , Cassian, _facts_  - is a dangerous or unnecessary thing? How?!” Bodhi paused in his ranting, took a deep breath and continued, in a much quieter voice, “Cass, listen, this is scary.”

Cassian looked up. Bodhi had that quiet, sad look on his face he got when he hadn’t piloted in a while, when he wondered if leaving his hometown and his mother (in London, thank you) was the right thing to do, when he looked at the destruction caused by forest fires. It made Cassian uncomfortable, because Bodhi was - well, he wasn’t a cheerful person, necessarily, but he was a determined one. Bodhi didn’t seem to think there was time for sadness - or if he did, he was usually sad in his private time. It was serious when Bodhi got that look on his face.

“I know you think we should stay out of it,” Bodhi continued, the anger leaking out of his voice and replaced with a heavy sorrow, “but this is too important. Cass, this is censorship. This is a dystopian novel, come to life.”

“What do you want to do about it?”

“I think we should tweet.”

Cassian blinked.

“We’ll just tweet out a fact. About climate change.”

Cassian raised an eyebrow.

“I just don’t see what’s so wrong about that? It’s not a falsehood, it’s not fake news,” Bodhi scoffed at the phrase, “it is scientifically proven, data driven fact.” He looked expectantly at his boss.

“Fine, do it,” Cassian sighed. “You’ll just stay in my office and keep talking. Or you’ll do it anyway. It’s not like you listen.”

Bodhi was already out the door. Cassian took a swig from his flask of emergency scotch. This felt like a bad idea.

\--

When Bodhi first arrived at Cassian’s office of Fire and Aviation Management, his face was set in determination, his eyes were wide with fear, all of his worldly possessions stuffed in a rusted, barely working jeep.

“I’m here to apply for the job,” he’d said, “the pilot one.”

“Kid,” he snorted, “that’s not -"

“I’m not a kid.”

“What?”

“Sir, I am not a kid.” Bodhi looked at him. Cassian noticed his hands shaking, but Bodhi’s gaze was clear, steady. “I’m a pilot.”

“And you think you’re the pilot for us?”

“I am the pilot,” Bodhi answered, sounding so sure of himself that Cassian nodded and took his paperwork.

Bodhi was young, but he was a good pilot, and one of the most qualified of all the ones Cassian had met. He was the only one the grumpy aviation manager thought he could work with in any sort of capacity. And he was right. They’d been working together for a few years now, and Cassian admired the pilot’s dedication, his readiness to fly under less-than-ideal conditions.

Cassian didn’t realize how deeply he’d come to rely on Bodhi Rook, until the pilot had been injured. It was a routine aerial surveillance job that had quickly become not routine when a weather system had brought in some bad weather. Bodhi’s plane went down, and they’d lost communication with him for a few, heart-stopping hours. But he’d managed, somehow, to send up his last known coordinates, and they’d started the search there. When they found him, he’d been huddled in the wreckage of his plane, soaked to the bone and shivering, a lost look in his eye.

“Bodhi, are you okay?” Cassian had asked, approaching him tentatively. Bodhi gave no sign that he’d heard the question. “Bodhi,” he said a bit more firmly. The pilot’s lips moved soundlessly, and a shudder wracked his slight frame.

“Sir, are you the pilot of this ship?” One of the paramedics asked, pushing his way past Cassian.

“The pilot?” Bodhi whispered, almost to himself. “The pilot.” As Cassian watched, the faraway look in Bodhi’s eyes disappeared, and he blinked once, twice, then looked up at the people surrounding him. He caught Cassian’s eye and nodded. “I am the pilot.”

“Don’t you ever do that again,” Cassian grumbled, hours later when Bodhi was recovering in the nearest hospital. “You reckless idiot.”

“I got all the data we needed, though,” Bodhi pointed out. “It’s all there. We’ll finish the project in time for Chirrut to present to Senator Krennic.”

“Fat load of good that’ll do, you know Tarkin’ll just cut our funding even more.”

“Don’t say that,” Bodhi said, “we’ve got a good case. We’ll make it work.”

They always did.

\--

“Excuse me?” Cassian shouted into his phone. “We have to do what?”

“Do it, Andor, or we’ll gut your funding so bad there won’t be money to pay your measly salary,” Krennic snarled.

“With all due respect,” Cassian began, then realized the call had been disconnected. He missed the days of handheld telephones, when a click had told you someone had hung up on you. “ROOK!” he shouted, storming out of his office.

“Yes, Cassian?” Bodhi asked. He was sitting with Jyn Erso, a new recruit in their fire management branch who worked very hard to look like she didn’t care about what was happening but who - in fact - deeply, deeply cared. Jyn smirked, then turned her attention back to Kaytoo, their ancient finicky bastard of a computer. It seemed to especially hate her - shorting out and shutting down whenever she went near it - but that only made her like the machine even more. They had an understanding, she said, as she convinced the computer to produce the data she needed.

“They’re telling us we have to delete the tweets. And hand over access to our twitter.”

“But…” Bodhi’s mouth dropped open in a stupefied expression that would have been funny if the situation weren’t so serious. “But...I only tweeted facts.”

“Didn’t you hear Tarkin on the telly the other day?” Jyn asked. “We live in a world where real facts don’t matter and alternative facts exist.”

“No.”

“Excuse me?” Cassian snarled.

“No.” Bodhi squared his shoulders and straightened to his full height. “I will not delete those tweets. That was an objective fact about climate change and we have the responsibility, and the right, to -”

“If we don’t delete those, Krennic’s going to gut this department and fire us all,” Cassian said. Bodhi froze.

“They can’t do that,” Jyn said.

“They can, and they will.” Cassian sighed. “We just have to survive how we can. We’ll figure out a way.”

“God, Krennic’s the worst,” Jyn muttered, and Cassian was inclined to agree.

“There,” Bodhi said. Jyn and Cassian both turned to look at him. He had his phone in his hands. “Deleted. Those tweets are deleted. We’re not going to be fired. We’re just silenced.” He shook his head. “I’ll be in my office.”

\--

Bodhi had been quiet in his office for hours. Looking back on it, Cassian knew he should have taken that to be an ominous sign. At the time, he’d assumed Bodhi was having a quiet moment and thinking about how democracy was failing. He should have known Bodhi wouldn’t take any of that lying down. Neither would Jyn.

When Cassian walked out of his office to get a sandwich from the cafeteria, he saw that Bodhi wasn’t in his office at all, was instead huddled with Jyn over Kaytoo. They were whispering, both to each other and to the reluctantly working computer, as Bodhi’s fingers flew over the keyboard.

“What are you two doing?” Cassian asked, suddenly feeling dread well up in his stomach. Both of them jumped. Bodhi looked slightly guilty but defiant, and the warning klaxon in Cassian’s head was blaring.

“Nothing,” Bodhi said, “nothing at all.”

“Yeah,” Jyn said, “nothing.” She lifted an eyebrow, as if daring him to investigate further.

“As long as nothing won’t get us into trouble, I don’t care.”

“About that…” Bodhi said. Cassian glared at him, and he quickly added, “it’s not illegal or anything, and it’s not like they didn’t say we could do it or anything…”

“I don’t want to know,” Cassian said, turning away. But he hadn’t gotten very far down the hallway, before he growled and walked back. “I do want to know. I should know what’s happening if it’s going to get me fired.”

“You won’t get fired,” Bodhi said quickly, aghast. “We made sure of it. We just, erm -”

“Created a rogue National Park Service twitter.” Jyn explained, spinning Kaytoo’s monitor around. The twitter page looked very much like their official one, except for the handle. “We used anonymous emails to create it. Nobody will know it’s us.” Bodhi turned it back to face him.

“But wouldn’t they be able to trace this back to this computer?” Cassian asked.

“Nope,” Jyn looked proud. “I could explain it to you -”

“That will not be necessary,” Cassian said, shaking his head. “I don’t want to know.”

“We already have a thousand followers,” Jyn pointed out, smirking wide. “President Vader can take away our twitter, but he can’t take away our ability to tweet!”

“I don’t think that’s quite right,” Bodhi said, looking up from Kaytoo, frowning.

“Creative license,” Jyn shrugged.

Bodhi nodded in agreement, his fingers flying over the keyboard. Cassian decided it was time for an Irish coffee, which meant a healthy measure of whiskey poured into his coffee mug, hold the coffee.

“There are more,” Bodhi gasped, suddenly.

“More?” Cassian walked around.

“More alternative twitters.” Bodhi looked up from the “Rogue Nasa” twitter, his face alight with something fierce. “This is wrong, and you know it. We’re resisting.” He looked back at the screen. “It’s small, but it’s what we can do. People are listening.”

The door to the department area swung open. Deputy Director of Operations Chirrut Imwe, accompanied with his right-hand man (and husband), Baze Malbus, strolled casually into the room. Chirrut was holding a smartphone, a serious, grave expression on his face.

“Is one of you responsible for this?” Chirrut asked.

“None of us is, Chirrut,” Cassian said, shrugging.

“I wouldn’t lie, either” Baze chimed in, “we know it was you.”

“How?!” Jyn howled, “I was careful.”

“Ah,” Chirrut said, a self-satisfied growing on his face. “We didn’t. But if it were an employee - or a group of them - in the National Parks Service, we thought it would most likely be you.”

“There are more than 20,000 employees at NPS,” Bodhi said, “you don’t know all of them. One of them could just as likely have done this.”

"That is true, but no other department has quite the reputation for, shall we say, going rogue,” Chirrut said.

“So are you here to stop us? Tell us you’ll have to turn us in?” Cassian stepped in front of his employees, as if to shield them from a fight. “You can tell Krennic or whoever, that it was my idea. Leave them out of it.”

“Now, why would I do that?” Chirrut asked, placid and calm. “I seem to have forgotten what you were supposed to have been doing. Regardless, I cannot openly condone whatever it is, but you have my full support.”

“And, if you want to keep doing this, I suggest you learn to proofread. You misspelled ‘preserve’ and used the wrong your. Y-O-U-R is possessive. How is the ESL speaker better at this than you?” Baze leveled them all with a look that suggested he was a very disappointed uncle. “I expect better from this thing I don’t know anything about.”

“Nothing at all,” Chirrut agreed. “You’re in good company though, right there with the dictionary and a fashion magazine. Now, if you’ll excuse us, we’re going to bury Krennic in so much paperwork, he’s going to regret his appointment to the Department of the Interior.”

“He is going to hate you so much,” Baze chuckled.

“If they think we’re going to let them destroy our parks, they’ve got to think again.” Chirrut nodded to all of them. “Come on, Baze.” And the two swept from the room.

“Jyn,” Bodhi said, breaking their stunned silence, “you’re going to have to get better at lying.”

“And you’re going to have to get better at typing,” she shot back.

Cassian took a moment, as he finished his coffee mug of whiskey, to reflect on the choices that led him up to this moment, overseeing this ragtag department who had decided that the Empire, as it was calling itself, wasn’t going to take their voices, who had decided to rebel. It looked like they were part of something bigger, though, and damn, if that didn’t excite him. He looked over at Bodhi and Jyn, heads once again bent toward Kaytoo, as they discussed the subject of their next tweet and argued over which of the other rogue agencies to include. They were in for a rough time, but if he was surrounded by people like them, well, there was no finer team.


End file.
